We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it. Anyone who used email in the 1990s remembers a similar, primitive era, when worms and viruses briefly ruled the net. But the connected world of that time was too simple to sustain an ecosystem of rogue escapees. Even today, much of the intern...

Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” — a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis, which is arguably the biggest open question in math. The new proof is, as Jared Duker Lichtman of Stanford University put it, “the most significant AI-for-math achievement so far, by quite a margin. Source Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the ...

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics , because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something 1 like this: It doesn’t matter how effective LLMs are at technical fields like programming or mathematics, because one of the essential values of those fields is that they’re art . While it looks to laypeople like these fields ...

Chessbook-1, Maia-3 and Allie 2.0 at a glance Capability scorecard: a 0-100 grade per measurement, and whether the model has the capability at all. Predicting human moves Matching strength Time scramble play Predicting think time Predicting who wins Chessbook-1 199M parameters 96 / 100 81 / 100 84 / 100 98 / 100 97 / 100 Maia-3 79M parameters 85 / 100 56 / 100 57 / 100 No 80 / 100 Allie 2.0 5.6B parameters 99 / 100 48 / 100 99 / 100...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Many new printing options The Advanced print dialog has new options, each with a matching -print-settings value: Print each page at its document page size ( paper=auto ) for documents with mixed page sizes ( #533 ) Choose paper source by document page size ( bin=auto ) ( #349 ) Center page horizontally on the paper ( center ) ( #348 ) Stretch pages to fill paper ( stretch ) ( #2220 ) Rotate printout ( rotate=90|1...

We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1 , but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters, all numbers, plus a few extra characters. Base64 represents three bytes with four ASCII characters. Base64 is how email carries attachments, how certificates are stored, how images get embedded in web pages (data URLs), and how bina...

We’re down to the final four segments, but we only have three walks left to do. The plan for today is to walk segment number 7 and also attach to it the beginning part of number 8. 23km, 870m of ascent, 1250m of descent. Next time, we’ll finish 8th and attach 9th to it, but that’s a problem for future me. I’ll be honest with you, I’m kinda tired of these walks. Especially because this second half stretches across trails I walked countless times before. But I also want to walk the who...

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged through experiments, failures, and operational experience—each challenge helping us replace a reasonable assumption with a more sensible default. m...

Decision models have exploded onto the scene recently, starting with TypeSafe’s Jev, followed by Perplexity’s Decider, Liquid’s d1, Cloudflare’s Clef, and OpenAI’s Decisions API 1 . These models promise fast, inexpensive classification. Decision models are an appealing low-cost alternative to LLM judges 2 for automated evals. But whether they’re the right choice depends on the cost, performance, and latency requirements of your use case. We’ve also noticed people using the def...

Today’s Music Monday concerns one of my favourite lyrics of all time : “Kathy, I’m lost”, I said; Though I knew she was sleeping. I also thought a “New Jersey Turnpike” was a fish until recently. This draft post was originally written on the 14th of April 2021. I just got around to posting it. Wow, that was more than five years ago. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-19. Today’s Music Monday concerns one of my favourite lyrics of all time : “Kathy, I...

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row! 🌙 California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander . And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, ...

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. 1 In this article, I examine the 8087...

One of the most wonderful aspects of math is how deep we can get by studying seemingly trivial questions. Consider the roots of unity, where "unity" simply means the number 1. Basics: roots of unity for real numbers Studying the roots of unity usually begins in middle school: what is the square root of 1? Equivalently, what are the solutions to this equation? \[x^2=1\] Well, there are two answers: 1 and -1. Similarly, we can ask the question for higher roots; the third roots are solu...

It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge . It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Gold...

This post has a content note of pet loss. Visit the link directly if you're okay with reading it. This post has a content note of pet loss. Visit the link directly if you're okay with reading it.

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A training center has been running its simulator suite for eighteen months. Now operators are preparing for a mission in a new region. The intelligence office has fresh terrain and threat data, some of it too sensitive to leave the building.   Until the simulators are updated with that data, pilots and sensor operators cannot practice in the new environment. Can the training center make...

The twenty-fourth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 24, I chat with Alex , the author of alexsirac.com about, among other things, collective intelligence in public commons, what the IndieWeb can learn from Wikipedia, community in comments, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Alex alexsirac.com The twenty-fourth episode of Wonders of Web We...

Terence Eden asking on Mastodon what people's setups look like. Here's mine - 38" ultrawide LG monitor that docks to my Framework 13, Fully standing desk, fish tank and motorbike helmets on the wall. I love my home office, but I do like heading into the office too. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment...

So what to make of OpenAI and the future of Math? Here are some points I've either: thought of myself or heard from a human or read from an AI. Throughout this post I use the term AI to mean an AI system that produces mathematical results.  I decline to say  OpenAI or  Anthropic as generic terms since about 20 years ago I used  Intrade  as a generic term for Betting Markets---then Intrade went out of business.  I wish I had bet on that happening. Oh well. 1) Some of the proofs were L...

La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...

Over at Talk Python, we just launched Talk Python Membership . This is a community of Python developers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts. It’s built around 4 pillars: monthly live tech meetups, a community, bonus episode summaries (coming soon), and no ads for the podcast. Please give it a look over at: talkpython.fm/community We have the first three tech talks already set up. You can see the full details at talkpython.fm/meetups : Talk Python in Production: Building Your Own In...

Prasanna Vijayanathan , Renzo Sanchez-Silva When Jake Paul and Mike Tyson stepped into the ring in November 2024, we delivered the fight to roughly 65 million concurrent streams. On an ordinary day our infrastructure takes in more than 2 billion requests and handles upwards of 38 million real-time logging events every second. At that scale, the whole picture doesn’t fit into a single engineering team’s head or onto a single dashboard. With more Live content, Podcasts and real-time streams, ...